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Charlie Kirk’s life looks like an open book. Born in 1993 in Arlington Heights, Illinois, in a middle -class home, from a young age he got involved in political life hugging without the slightest doubt conservatism.
At 18 he was accepted at Baylor University, but decided not to go to activism. One of his first movements was to co -found in 2012, along with businessman Bill Montgomery, TURNING Point USA (TPUSA), a conservative organization focused on attracting university and young students to the right, and headed from the beginning to “restore traditional American values such as patriotism, respect for life, freedom, family and fiscal responsibility.”
He was an outstanding carrier of Christian nationalism from Turning Point Faith, Entity that founded in 2021 dedicated to recruiting pastors and ecclesiastical leaders to participate in local and national political matters. And conceived to “defend our rights granted by God, providing the tools to expose lies and articulate the connection between faith and freedom.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rvc9l6pjxti
Kirk’s ideology and speech were not, of course, very different from that of populist conservatism in vogue, and in particular to Donald Trump. It was not what a thought creator is said, but an ideological player in gender, race, religion, reproductive rights, marriage, immigration, border control, citizenship by birth, Gaza and Israel, among others.
Not to vary, he repeated before students and professors that universities were “Marxism factories.” And he did it in a challenging and provocative way, but with the certainty and conviction of a crusade and encouraging a conservative Christian counterculture as a great wall before secularism.
It was, in short, a rising star that used the word as a weapon. And one of the most influential figures of the conservative/populist wing of the Republicans, especially among young people. “Trump’s next generation in the movement Maga”, Said their supporters and supporters.
The day they killed him On the Campus of the Universidad del Valle de Utah, a video is heard a voice that asks: “Do you know how many transgender Americans have starred in mass shootings in the last ten years?” And Kirk replies: “Too many.”
The same person told him that there were only five. Then they asked him if he knew how many mass shootings they had taken place in the United States in the last ten years.
“When or not, the violence of the gangs?” He replied.
Then he knocked him out of his chair a shot in the neck, fired from afar with the precision of an goldsmith.
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Now the problem is not to discuss whether Charlie Kirk was right or not, whether or not you agree with your creed. Because it would be useless to ignore it: his murder is nothing but, on the one hand, of a long history of political violence that he has to his credit Presidents killed —Abraham Lincoln (1865), James Garfield (1881), William McKinley (1901) and John F. Kennedy (1963) -, and leaders cut from rennet in the fullness of their lives such as Robert F. Kennedy (1968) and Martin Luther King Jr. (1968). Without forgetting assassination attempts such as Andrew Jackson (1835) and Ronald Reagan (1981).
On the other, there was no lack of unequivocal signs that a fact like this could happen at any time. In 2020 we saw one of the first: the attempt to kidnap the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, A case of domestic terrorism headed by members of Wolverine Watchmen, a local militia.
Two years later an intruder broke into the residence of the then president of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, with the aim of kidnapping her, but with a different balance in the absence of the goal: to fell to her 82 -year -old husband in the head, causing serious injuries. Also for politics. And in 2024, The attempt to kill Donald Trump in Pennsylvania during a rally as a presidential candidate.
Then, in April 2025, we knew from the Molotov cocktails that they threw in the house of the governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro; And in June of the murders of the former president of the Chamber of Representatives of Minnesota, Melissa Hortmanand her husband at her home in Brooklyn Park. And that the same individual who shot another democratic state legislator, John Hoffman (9 bullets), already his wife Yvette (8), who survived. According to the authorities, they were politically motivated acts at the hands of Vance Luther Boelter, a fundamentalist Christian.
All of the above operates in a scenario where we are assured, again and again, that the second amendment to the Constitution gives the right to buy and carry highly lethal military armament just with a minimum background check.
And in the midst of a macabre ritual that is repeated again and again: see on TV the news about shootings in schools and universities, with a certain number of victims, only to wait for another incident of that type and listen again to the same condolences to family members and the same prayers for the victims after the inaction of a congress unable to produce legislation in this regard.
And it happens – this is the most important – in a culture that from a while to this part has lost the distinction between adversaries and enemies, dominated by passions and hatred, a painful bundo that lasts any possible civility.
It is that words do not fall in a vacuum. We are talking about a polarized and no dialogue society in which one of the poles incites, from power, to “fight like hell” to recover yours and end up assaulting the Capitol; to carry out remuneration and vendettas against political opponents; To assault the cities with military and long weapons (in historical legislation and practice), and to blame the “radical left” of this murder as if the label was not challenged by evidence. The suspect in custody for Kirk’s murder is Tyler Robinson, who brings together all the conditions to put it in crisis.
A young white, hetero, raised within a mormone family in the religious, republican in the political and related since childhood with the culture of firearms, has silenced one of the most divisive voices of the national political landscape.
What has left over and left over is social stress and polarization. The life of this young ultraconservator, segated by a bullet that should never have left that rifle, perhaps it is the last warning of a major problem if the spiral of Manichaeism, hate and violence does not end once and for all in the United States of America.
